Looking into the Chinese 'Mirror'
- By Sabine Weber
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E-mail China Today, September 21, 2017
"China Is different!"
China's geographic location allowed sociocultural and intellectual development in a direction which differed vastly from the one in continental Europe. Thus, China found very different answers to fundamental questions of human existence and world experience than the people on the other side of the world. These ranged from, for instance, ideas concerning the self-perception of human beings, the relation between humans and society and also the relation between humans and nature.
This resulted in a different perspective on the world and perception of reality, including the perspectives on truth, deductions leading to the truth and what meaning these cognitions give to people's lives. "China is different!" Labisch underlined. And it was exactly this otherness that made the intercultural dialogue with China so fascinating for the German scholar.
The Chinese worldview offers alternatives, which become a mirror for the Western perception of the world. This is true not only for matters of daily life, cultural traits and the order of human beings, family and society, but also for human relationships with nature, with science, philosophy, and theology.
The case of a huge country like China with a rich history and a large population, and all this without having a state religion, is a unique concept that not only caused fascination since the Enlightenment among some well-known European philosophers like Leibniz, but also evoked repulsion among others like Hegel.
The Chinese "mirror" provides Europe with new insights into its inner-self and its perception of the world. And it is exactly these differences and points of friction which, for Labisch, offer the potential to provide a closer understanding of the "conditio humana" and a more sophisticated image of the general condition of humankind.
Which dimensions for action and involvement are implemented and possible in human nature? And how do these options become real under different natural and social conditions? These questions are, at some level, relevant to scientists of all fields.
Thus, it seems almost natural that an accomplished historian, sociologist, and physician such as Labisch became part of an organization which primarily aimed at the dissemination of a culture, which he himself had never witnessed on its own soil.
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